Light emitting diode (LED) lighting devices are commonly deployed as general illumination devices, for example, in homes, buildings of commercial and other enterprise establishments, as well as in various outdoor settings. LEDs are also being applied in other applications, such as variable beam width flash photography, lighting for photography, display technologies and the like.
The trend for semiconductor devices is to become smaller, more miniaturized, while maintaining substantially similar performance as previous generation devices. Since LEDs are semiconductor devices, LEDs have also become miniaturized, hence the advent of chip-scale packages that contain light emitting semiconductor devices, referred to as “microLEDs.” The term “microLEDs” as used herein usually refers to LEDs with dimensions measured in microns. A chip scale package may have an area of no more than 120% of the area of the original die size and is a direct surface mountable device. The microLEDs chip-scale packages may be microscopic light emitting diodes that are formed using various semiconductor fabrication methods, such as a Gallium Nitride (GaN) with sapphire fabrication, wafer level fabrication or other fabrication techniques. The size and fabrication techniques of microLEDs differentiate them from prior generation LEDs. Some advantages of microLEDs over prior generation LEDs include higher light extraction efficiency, higher surface-to-volume ratio to dissipate heat more effectively, and more flexibility to be arranged in optical design due to its truly-point-source-like uniqueness. For example, not only have mircoLEDs found use in general illumination but also use in mobile device displays and camera flash devices. One method for maintaining the lighting performance of the microLEDs has been to incorporate integrated optics (e.g., chip-scale optics) over the output of the microLEDs to manipulate emitted light at the chip-scale level. While the integrated static optics may improve lighting performance of the microLED, the optical distribution of the light output by the microLED device, however, is fixed. The chip-scale static optics do not enable any variation in the beam shape or beam direction of the light output from the microLED chip scale device.
Hence, there is room for further improvement by providing chip-level spatial modulation capabilities of lighting devices that utilize microLEDs.